GUWonder

Rottmann made it clear that the citizenship laws of the Member States are within the scope of EU law and must not run afoul of the EU body law. It made it clear that the general principles of EU law are applicable to how a Member State may confer or withdraw member state citizenship. It also made it clear that the ECJ -- not some member state court, nor some member state administrative body -- is the final arbiter in disputes of this nature.

As an Advocate General at the ECJ noted: "a State rule providing for loss of nationality in the event of a transfer of residence to another Member State would undoubtedly constitute an infringement of the right of movement and residence conferred on citizens of the Union by Article 18 EC."

I get it that some people don't like the situation as is, but it is what it is.

CPH-Flyer

This is the ruling in the Rottmann case:

On those grounds, the Court (Grand Chamber) hereby rules:
It is not contrary to European Union law, in particular to Article 17 EC, for a Member State to
withdraw from a citizen of the Union the nationality of that State acquired by naturalisation when
that nationality was obtained by deception, on condition that the decision to withdraw observes the
principle of proportionality.

I don't dispute the existence of EU citizenship, which Denmark tried to exempt in the Edinburgh agreement after a no vote to the Maastricht treaty. However, Rottmann was not protected by EU citizenship, in terms of Germany withdrawing the German citizenship. It was considered proportional as he had obtained his citizenship by deception.
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GUWonder

I had read the ruling years ago and know what it said.

livious

I had an interesting discussion with our Travel Category Manager concerning my employers switch to Concur, which has been a headache for most employees. While the bugs have been getting sorted out over time, I mentioned that there is still a huge problem getting Concur to show all available flights, in particular Flexible tickets, and distinguishing HBO fares. After she rolled her eyes and took a few deep breaths, she explained that this problem has been sorted out by all airlines except one...our beloved SAS. Apparently quite a few larger companies in Skåne have made the switch to Concur at the same time and are all quite frustrated that SAS IT cannot give access to the information needed to populate searches. She went on to explain that SAS was given 6+ months notice of this and still has done nothing to rectify the problem, meaning that it is harder for the companies using Concur to book SAS flights. She used SAS as a negative example for several points in the meeting for travel booking, including the elimination of 3rd party lounge access. It seems that the corporate people are just as frustrated as I am for my leisure travels.

SAS has a new website that is terrible and completely user un-friendly. They are not apparently able to show all flights to those using Concur and must be losing corporate revenue because of this. They are currently showing the following message on SAS.se: "SAS Customer Service – Unusually long waiting time." yet I get daily responses to a complaint I made about not being able to connect to my wife in the SAS app. I have pointed out that I don't really care if they fix the problem, yet they still keep trying.

I am curious as to what SAS's priorities are at the moment. Outside of implementing priority boarding, it seems that the first half of 2017 has been spent shooting themselves in the foot. Surely there is a master plan, right?

CPH-Flyer

Concur is probably one of the worst systems I have ever encountered for doing travel booking, it does not find available flights, it displays fares far higher than needed, and don't get me started on the hotel booking. I am not surprised that your travel department are keen on blaming airlines for their poor choice of system. Concur is just a poor solution!

livious

I have no doubt that Concur is terrible, but a quick check showed that I could find flexible fares and various fare buckets for other *A airlines except SAS. Given the state of their own website, I would have guessed SAS IT was focused on corporate bookings or TAs. It seems that they are doing neither, but working on my app problem.

Regarding Concur, I have not had a problem finding hotels but train tickets cannot be booked and rental cars have been a problem. I usually end up calling the TA we use (HRG) as they sort things out rather well. I would still love to book my own tickets, but that will never happen.

Fredrik74

So they are focusing on shiny toys instead of their core business. That will end well, I'm sure...

GUWonder

A couple of SK Eurobonus customer accounts are set to have their sub-2500 points expire tomorrow. What's the cheapest and easiest way to keep the points from expiring?

fassy

And far as I know you can't prevent them from expiring... (besides having Diamond status).

GUWonder

Transfer of points to another account doesn't work to prevent them from expiring? It costs a bit, but maybe it's worth it.

CPH-Flyer

I would assume that they tick in as new points on the receiving account, they do on most programmes. But I have not tried with SK. The price used to be pretty steep though.

CPH-Flyer

It is not Concur and SK systems in general that mismatch, I just had a play around with our Concur solution for CPH-LHR bookings, I can see which ones are Go Light, I can search for flexible fares on SK and find them. I guess it is how your TA, or your procurement department has selected to setup the system, as it can work. SK is not a preferred carrier for us, so there would be limits to how much energy there would have been invested in adapting specifically for SK systems.

I can see that the bookings are based on the Apollo system.

oliver2002

Concur can be customised to work with any GDS. Concur, like the OTAs, got stumped by the introduction of light fares, as well as the fact that every airline used a different way to code/file the light fares. Which probably was on purpose, as the airlines want you to use direct access and save gds fees in the process.

livious

Regardless of Concur, I am still surprised to hear that our corporate travel reps (along with a few other large companies) are complaining that we cannot access all SAS's fares and that SAS is doing nothing to remedy the situation. In this day and age the booking interfaces are important, and SAS cannot seem to provide this to leisure (via sas.se) and (some) corporate travelers. Hard to stay profitable when you make it difficult to book tickets. In my company's case, SAS is a preferred carrier and I would be interested to see how much of our travel has shifted away from SAS since our switch to Concur.

nacho

A big MNC that Mr. is working for now is also using Concur, I had a chance to try it by helping him booking his business trip to China a couple of months ago, and I hate concur (fortunately it's rare for him to travel for business - he hated it - he said we stayed at better hotels when we are travelling on our own dime - don't get me wrong, we don't even use 5* hotels but the approved hotels by his company plus previous employers are just pathetic). The booking process is designed for people who don't care IMO (i.e. those who are not here on FT). IF you don't care where you stay and who you fly with, it's simple and pretty easy actually. But for us knowing what's better, then using Concur to book is a real PITA.

His employer has very strict travel policy - basically book the cheapest fare (only CEO level can fly C, and those have doctor's approval can fly Plus) + hotel whenever possible. Even then he wasn't able to book the same cheap fare we booked although we all have the same booking class (basically we were on the same flight), maybe the 1000 DKK premium was ASR for all the cheap seats (we couldn't attach his reservation to ours so that we can seat together and get access to better seats as *G).

Their prefer airline is also SK - thankfully not DY like his previous employer. It states very clearly on his Concur page that if a SK non-stop flight is available, you have to take it, basically no other choices (kind of make sense), unless there's no more Y fare available.

When booking with Concur, anything out of the ordinary will get you a warning of violation of company's travel policy - which I found it ridiculous. All it takes was to book a hotel that's not within 15km of where he is "supposed" to be despite the cost being the same. I asked a German friend that he needs to book through Concur and he said he runs into the violation all the time, despite the fact that he was saving $ for his company.